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Monday, August 25, 2008

Perfect virtual desktops. Almost...

Like most Windows devs I really like the Sysinternals family of products. So when I caught wind this morning of a new product called Desktops that creates a virtual workspace of up to 4 desktops I just knew it was the product I was looking for. Well, it sort of is.
You can't ask for an easier installation. Unzip it and drop it on a folder and run it. In the dialog that appears you can select whether to run it at startup. Here's a shot of that dialog.

It has a nice selection of options to select which desktop you are using but sadly it doesn't support the most important one -- the arrow keys! Someone who is using virtual desktop software is enough of a power user that they will want to switch desktops on-the-fly without looking at the keyboard. Sure I can whack a number key without looking but the T-shape arrow keypad just fits with the metaphor a bit better. A simple Ctrl+Shift+Arrow would do the trick.
The other problem is the speed. It's a bit slow and has no nice swipes or transitions but it is free software so I'm really not griping about that too much.
All in all a welcome bit of software. Thanks Mark!

19 comments:

Just reading your blog (as I've a small issue with connection pooling with my app and with connector.net 5.2.3...), I saw your article on virtual desktop. Pretty funny, as I've looked for one 2 days ago and didn't choose Sysinternal's one but another opensource and pretty customizable one: VirtuaWin (customizable because it's light and accept plugins to extend it). Try it, you'll like it!

Yes, i tried itcan i have the feature like rotating the desktop like in fedora 9.this is only a switcher.in fedora we have feature which shows the rotation of desktops, really a great feature.<a href="http://www.uspersonals.com/">USPersonals</a>

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